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GERMAN 133:Marx, Nietzsche, Freud

We read and discuss selections from works by the key master thinkers who have exerted a lasting influence by debunking long-cherished beliefs. Do these authors uphold or repudiate Enlightenment notions of rationality, autonomy and progress? How do they assess the achievements of civilization? How do their works illuminate the workings of power in social and political contexts? Readings and discussion in German.

This course takes students on a trip to major capital cities, at different moments in time: Renaissance Florence, Golden Age Madrid, Colonial Mexico City, Enlightenment and Romantic Paris, Existential and Revolutionary St. Petersburg, Roaring Berlin, Modernist Vienna, and bustling Buenos Aires. While exploring each place in a particular historical moment, we will also consider the relations between culture, power, and social life. How does the cultural life of a country intersect with the political activity of a capital? How do large cities shape our everyday experience, our aesthetic preferences, and our sense of history? Why do some cities become cultural capitals? Primary materials for this course will consist of literary, visual, sociological, and historical documents (in translation); authors we will read include Boccaccio, Dante, Sor Juana, Montesquieu, Baudelaire, Gogol, Irmgard Keun, Freud, and Borges. Note: To be eligible for WAYS credit, you must take the course for a Letter Grade.

What, if anything, does reading literature do for our lives? What can literature offer that other forms of writing cannot? Can fictions teach us anything? Can they make people more moral? Why do we take pleasure in tragic stories? This course introduces students to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. It addresses key questions about the value of literature, philosophical puzzles about the nature of fiction and literary language, and ways that philosophy and literature interact. Readings span literature, film, and philosophical theories of art. Authors may include Sophocles, Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Proust, Woolf, Walton, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Students master close reading techniques and philosophical analysis, and write papers combining the two. This is the required gateway course for the Philosophy and Literature major tracks. Majors should register in their home department.

Masters of German 20th- and 21st-Century literature and philosophy as they present aesthetic innovation and confront the challenges of modern technology, social alienation, manmade catastrophes, and imagine the future. Readings include Nietzsche, Freud, Rilke, Musil, Brecht, Kafka, Doeblin, Benjamin, Juenger, Arendt, Musil, Mann, Adorno, Celan, Grass, Bachmann, Bernhardt, Wolf, and Kluge. Taught in English. Note for German Studies grad students:
GERMAN 322 will fulfill the grad core requirement since
GERMAN 332 is not being offered this year. NOTE: Enrollment requires Professor Eshel's consent. Please contact him directly at eshel@stanford.edu and answer these 2 questions: "Why do you want to take this course?" and "What do you think you can add to the discussion?" Applications will be considered in the order in which they were received. Enrollment is limited to 20 students.

GLOBAL 30:Sufism: Past and Present (GLOBAL 230)

Sufism, often defined as `Islamic mysticism,¿ is essential for a deep understanding of the inner dimension of Islamic spirituality. This course offers a survey of the development of Sufism from its formation through the modern period. Students will be introduced to the fundamental ideas, practices, and institutions of Sufism. The course will familiarize students with an introductory understanding of Sufism in its historical context and will challenge students to engage critically with the academic debates on Sufism.

GLOBAL 135:Around the World in Ten Films (FILMSTUD 135, FILMSTUD 335)

This is an introductory-level course about the cinema as a global language. We will undertake a comparative study of select historical and contemporary aspects of international cinema, and explore a range of themes pertaining to the social, cultural, and political diversity of the world. A cross-regional thematic emphasis and inter-textual methods of narrative and aesthetic analysis, will ground our discussion of films from Italy, Japan, United States, India, China, France, Brazil, Nigeria, Russia, Iran, Mexico, and a number of other countries. Particular emphasis will be placed on the multi-cultural character and the regional specificities of the cinema as a "universal language" and an inclusive "relational network."nnThere are no prerequisites for this class. It is open to all students; non-majors welcome.

GLOBAL 139:History of Philosophy from Al-Kindi to Averroes (PHIL 101A)

The rise of Islam saw a flourishing of philosophical and scientific activity across Islamic civilizations from Central Asia to Spain. Between the 7th to 13th centuries, many of the major philosophers in the history of philosophy lived in the Muslim world and wrote in Arabic. They saw themselves, just as later philosophers in medieval Europe, as working in part in the same tradition as Plato and Aristotle. This course surveys this important chapter in the history of philosophy, examining the key philosophical problems, analyses, arguments and ideas developed by philosophers such as Al-Kindi, Al-Razi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Ghazali and Averroes, as well as their views on the role and aims of philosophy itself. We will look closely at their writings (in English translation) on philosophical topics in mind, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and politics.

The course examines the mediums of public art that have been voices of social change, protest and expressions of community desire in Iran. It will offer a unique glimpse into Iran's contemporary art and visual culture through the investigation of public art practices such as graffiti and street art, as well as older traditions of oral storytelling such as Naghali and Iranian Coffeehouse Painting. Iranian case studies will be expanded in comparison with local and global examples, while students examine the infrastructural conditions of public art, such as civic, public, and private funding, relationships with local communities, and the life of these projects as they move in and out of the artworld. This encompassing view anchors a legacy of Iranian cultural contributions in larger trajectories of art history, contemporary art, and community arts practice. The class format is both lecture and art studio practice. Students will propose either new public art works or research to provoke their own ideas while engaging the ever-changing state of public discourse in these case studies.

GLOBAL 249A:The Iranian Cinema: Image and Meaning (COMPLIT 249A)

This course will focus on the analysis of ten Iranian films with the view of placing them in discourse on the semiotics of Iranian art and culture. The course will also look at the influence of a wide array of cinematic traditions from European, American, and Asian masters on Iranian cinema. Note: This course must be taken for a minimum of 3 units and a letter grade to be eligible for Ways credit.

GLOBAL 249B:Iranian Cinema in Diaspora (COMPLIT 249B)

Despite enormous obstacles, immigrant Iranian filmmakers, within a few decades (after the Iranian Revolution), have created a slow but steady stream of films outside Iran. They were originally started by individual spontaneous attempts from different corners of the world and by now we can identify common lines of interest amongst them. There are also major differences between them. These films have never been allowed to be screened inside Iran, and without any support from the global system of production and distribution, as independent and individual attempts, they have enjoyed little attention. Despite all this, Iranian cinema in exile is in no sense any less important than Iranian cinema inside Iran. In this course we will view one such film, made outside Iran, in each class meeting and expect to reach a common consensus in identifying the general patterns within these works and this movement. Questions such as the ones listed below will be addressed in our meetings each week: What changes in aesthetics and point of view of the filmmaker are caused by the change in his or her work environment? Though unwantedly these films are made outside Iran, how related are they to the known (recognized) cinema within Iran? And in fact, to what extent do these films express things that are left unsaid by the cinema within Iran? NOTE: This course must be taken for a minimum of 3 units and a letter grade to be eligible for Ways credit.